"What does it mean to learn and develop as a writer? What is a multimodal text? How is writing different in the age of the internet and mobile phone, particularly in relation to teaching, assessing and researching writing?Drawing on UK and US research and case studies, Richard Andrews and Anna Smith set out to explore these questions and to develop a new model of writing development that is relevant for the digital age. This is a bold enterprise indeed and, although some chapters present complex arguments in their overview of existing research and theories (for example, those exploring distinctions between product-related and process-related models), the authors are largely successful in this aim....And as befits a book about writing in the digital age we are invited to continue the conversation at www.developingwriters.org. I have a feeling this book will become a key text for those wishing to reflect on their practice as teachers of writing or as teachers as writers."

NowComment makes it easy to have rich, engaging discussions of online documents no matter how large (or small) your class or collaboration group.

NowComment is fast, powerful, and feature-rich: you can sort comments, skim summaries, create assignments, hide comments, reply privately, and much moreIt's free, a project of public interest group Fairness.com LLC. Take 60 seconds to get an account now!

The Atlantic The Hidden World of the Typewriter The Atlantic So intense was this relationship between writers and their machines, that many people who made their careers out of writing never made the transition to computers; Hunter S.

Teaching Students Better Online Research Skills Education Week News In November 2012, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released a study that surveyed 2,067 Advanced Placement and National Writing Project teachers.

Summary: Bob Fecho and Stephanie Jones, co-directors of the Red Clay Writing Project, offer their inquiry- and research-focused analysis of New Dorp High School's recent successes in this response to Peg Tyre's "The ...

"Mural.ly is a new tool (still in beta, launched last week) that is a cross between Prezi and mind maps. It’s easy to use and share what you create (perfect for most students, teachers, and parents) but the real beauty of mural.ly is in its lack of structure.

What draws me to use the site is the ability to fluidly lay out all your ideas, thoughts, images, and whatever else you want on one simple board. It’s designed to be home to your random ideas, inspiration, and other thoughts."

This has so many possiblities for students. The ability to collaborate and share resources on a project, creating a place for an artist to brainstorm their ideas, and a place to brainstorm for content, planning or curriculum. Looking forward to learning more about this site and how to implement in the classroom.

-About 27 percent of students perform at or above the Proficient level at both grades-About 80 percent of students perform at or above the Basic level at both grades-Female students score higher than male students at both grades

During the summer, Google sneaked a new tool in to Google Documents that is totally awesome. It allows students (or anyone) to perform searches for web resources, images, quotes, and scholarly articles from within the document -- and then it cites the sources with a click of a button!

"I regularly use Twitter’s own search as well as TweetDeck and Kred (once I am logged in) to scan and search the hashtags and keywords.

But, Topsy is a game changer.

The free comprehensive index and social analysis tool, searches keywords, hashtags and @ signs from minutes ago or from across a span of years, retrieving your social needles from millions of haystacks of billions of tweets.

Topsy is a way to instantly discover breaking news and just released press-releases and track current conversations and just posted media."

During the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, Topsy and Twitter created the Twitter Political Index (or Twindex), which provided a daily gauge of voters’ sentiment for each candidate as expressed on Twitter. Using mentions of their last name or direct @mentions of their Twitter handle, the Twindex tracked sentiment for Obama and Romney from May 1 until Election day, showing when each gained momentum in the race.

How Twitter used Topsy APIs

Twitter used Topsy’s content and metrics API data to create a custom dashboard to help capture the nuance of public opinion.

Live tracking of sentiment to produce the Twindex. Additional, minute-level analysis during convention speeches and debatesMention counts on a wide array of topic areas—including the economy, foreign policy, and immigration—on a minute, hourly, and daily basisHistorical comparative analysis between the Gallup poll for presidential approval between 2010-2012 and Topsy sentiment for Obama, demonstrating a strong correlation between the two (and strongest when Topsy sentiment led the Gallup numbers by a few days)

In a survey of Advanced Placement and National Writing Project teachers, a majority say digital tools encourage students to be more invested in their writing by encouraging personal expression and providing a wider audience for their work.

Lucas J.W. Johnson: "Last week at Transmedia Vancouver, I presented an Introduction to Transmedia class. I wanted to cover a lot of the overview and basics of transmedia storytelling for those members new to transmedia and provide them with resources, so that in the future, our conversations can really move forward, into the nuts and bolts, into a space where we can all learn from each other."

New York Times (blog)Encourage Authentic Writing With #WhatIWrite and #NaNoWriMoNew York Times (blog)So along with the National Writing Project and the National Council of Teachers of English, we invite you (and your students, and everyone else you...

In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian reached out to some of today’s most celebrated authors and asked them to each offer his or her commandments. After Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, here come 8 from the one and only Neil Gaiman:

In the coming months, the conversation about the importance of formal writing instruction and its place in a public-school curriculum—­the conversation that was central to changing the culture at New Dorp—will spread throughout the nation. Over the next two school years, 46 states will align themselves with the Common Core State Standards. For the first time, elementary-­school students—­who today mostly learn writing by constructing personal narratives, memoirs, and small works of fiction—will be required to write informative and persuasive essays. By high school, students will be expected to produce mature and thoughtful essays, not just in English class but in history and science classes as well.

Common Core’s architect, David Coleman, says the new writing standards are meant to reverse a pedagogical pendulum that has swung too far, favoring self-­expression and emotion over lucid communication. “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think,” he famously told a group of educators last year in New York. Early accounts suggest that the new writing standards will deliver a high-voltage shock to the American public. Last spring, Florida school officials administered a writing test that, for the first time, required 10th-graders to produce an expository essay aligned with Common Core goals. The pass rate on the exam plummeted from 80 percent in 2011 to 38 percent this year.

According to the Nation’s Report Card, in 2007, the latest year for which this data is available, only 1 percent of all 12th-graders nationwide could write a sophisticated, well-­organized essay. Other research has shown that 70 to 75 percent of students in grades four through 12 write poorly. Over the past 30 years, as knowledge-based work has come to dominate the economy, American high schools have raised achievement rates in mathematics by providing more­-extensive and higher-level instruction. But high schools are still graduating large numbers of students whose writing skills better equip them to work on farms or in factories than in offices; for decades, achievement rates in writing have remained low.

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